Why They Mattered: Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez was a master of surprise and would ambush friend and foe alike with sudden, unexpected acts to project his authority. The tactic helped keep Venezuela’s president in power for 14 years, but his greatest bombshell, the one that really flummoxed everyone, was his death.

Supporters and detractors had long assumed Hurricane Hugo, a leader with superhuman energy and a body of reinforced concrete, would rule for decades. Instead, his tearful vice president, Nicolás Maduro, told a stunned nation on March 5 that the comandante had succumbed to cancer in a Caracas hospital at just 58 years old.

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The announcement was not unexpected. Chávez had been ailing since revealing the disease in 2011. He claimed to have been cured, but toward the end his frailty told a different story.

Even so, his passing left the region, and the United States, dumbstruck. He had so dominated Latin America’s stage, and bashed the United States with such exuberance, that his death was like pulling the plug halfway through Evita.

Now the showman is gone, so too his rhetorical panache, and it is clearer than ever that his self-styled Bolivarian revolution, named after independence hero Simón Bolívar, was a tragi-comedy in the end.

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Chávez had immense political gifts and the luck to lead a petrostate during a time of record oil revenues. He also, through consecutive election victories, had a mandate to transform a dysfunctional, corrupt state.

He squandered it all. Mismanagement and reckless populism left Venezuela a basket case of inflation, shortages, violent crime, lawlessness and economic distortion. You can fill an SUV tank in Venezuela for under $1, but a Big Mac sets you back $20. The “21 st-century socialism” he hoped to export is rejected even by allies in Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

For now, Chavismo, a baggy mix of vote-buying, media control and authoritarianism under radical slogans, still prevails in Venezuela. Maduro narrowly won a presidential election after his boss’s death, and local elections recently bolstered his position.

Without Chávez, however, the decay of infrastructure, institutions and social programs—including those that helped slash poverty—is harder to conceal. The former soldier had an almost mystical connection with the poor and an ability to distract, or grab international headlines, with stunts. He would ride a bicycle, a tractor or a tank, recite poetry, croon a ballad, dance, rap, blow kisses, cradle a rifle, a baby or a guitar, mobilize troops, nationalize industries, expel diplomats, reveal assassination “plots.”

He could turn any occasion into a show. As the Guardian’s Caracas correspondent several years ago, I once asked him about abolishing term limits, and found myself pilloried on live TV as a vassal of British imperialism, European vice and genocidal impulses.

It was President George W. Bush who received Chávez’s choicest insults. “The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, one day after Bush had spoken from the same podium. Chávez also branded Bush “Mr. Danger,” “the drunken cowboy” and “more dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade.”

Chávez boasted friendships with Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell and Danny Glover, among other Hollywood stars, and for a time he was feted for forging an alternative to neo-liberalism. Corruption and incompetence so fractured Venezuela’s economy, however, that not even oil revenues could paper the cracks. As he closed more radio and TV stations, and started jailing some opponents, some but not all his foreign fans drifted away.

Maduro is continuing the same ruinous policies of price and exchange rate controls, but he lacks the master’s talent for distraction. He cannot blend folksy humor with personal anecdotes and ideological thunder. When he blames CIA sabotage for power cuts, and expels yet more U.S. diplomats—reliable Chávez chestnuts—few pay heed. It’s like a tired repeat of an old movie, of which Chávez, for better or worse, was always the star.